From Sketch to Still

In a recurring series,Vanity Fair pulls back the curtain on awards season’s most visually enticing films, revealing exclusive details of the creative process of art directors, costume designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, and more. This week, Eve Stewart—nominated this year for her third Oscar—discusses her production design for Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables.

Oscar-nominated costume designer Eve Stewart was inspired to create Gavroche’s elephant after reading this passage in Victor Hugo’s novel: “The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters, he wished to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he had lodged a child there.”

By Eve Stewart.

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While much has been made of the live singing in Les Misérables, few critics have considered how it challenged the crew. “My entire scenery had to be completely silent!” says production designer Eve Stewart.

Fortunately, the three-time Oscar nominee is at her best when finding creative solutions for necessary constraints. (To wit: To compensate for a shortage of extras while filming The King’s Speech, Stewart filled empty chairs with dummies. She even named them.) This time, she employed a new set of tricks: to muffle hoof-beats, Stewart created rubber shoes for the horses. To stop rhythmic raindrops, she draped rooftops with blankets painted to look like tiles. To prevent the painstakingly handmade beads from clacking in the factory, she replaced them with rubber beads. She even distributed wool hats to the film crew, “in case rain hit their heads and bashed off.” The designer’s tremendous sense of fun shines through her sketches, too. (To your blogger, they recall Quentin Blake’s fantastic illustrations for Roald Dahl.)

Before she sat down to visualize Hooper’s take on the West End classic, Stewart considered all former adaptations. “I was very familiar with the London production,” Stewart says. “I loved John Napier’s set, especially the twirling barricade—we wanted to pay homage to that, but making a film, you have to do it in a different way.” Often, Stewart says, they used that difference to their advantage. “We were trying to achieve the views that you could never get in the theater. One being the great big long shot. One being a very big close-up. Through the long shot, we were trying to make people look like they weren’t important—that they were just a number to the state. We were trying to emphasize that. You only let your soul out when you’re completely alone.”

As additional research, Stewart (who’s from England) retraced Jean Valjean’s journey through France. She consulted a professional pickpocket to devise the ways in which the Thénardiers (played by Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen) would rob their guests blind. And she culled inspiration from personal experience: the gauze-curtained hospital where Fantine dies recalls Stewart's childhood memory of visiting her ailing grandmother.

But the richest resource was Victor Hugo’s novel. After reading it, Stewart set out to re-create the vividly described images. In the novel, young Gavroche sleeps in a giant plaster elephant that had been built as a symbol of the emperor’s supremacy. In the film, he rides it in the final sequence.

In one departure from the play, Stewart decided to use more color in her designs. “On the stage, it’s very blue and gray. Very cold. [But] if you look at pictures of the poorest areas of the world, India, South America, they’re always really vibrant,” she says. “People have a stamp on their own square foot of life. That’s what I wanted to show.”

The designer also endeavored to create a certain downtrodden patina over the film—as if everyone really was enduring “a hard life.” The buildings, she says, “all were skinny, and they were collapsing and too tired to go on. Every piece of furniture was picked with that in mind—that it was just exhausted by the effort of being poor.” That made for a slow-going, meticulous selection process, and the designers experienced a setback when the actors found the barricade a little too inspiring. “Tom, in his amazing directorial way, whipped them into such anarchic frenzy that they couldn’t help themselves from ripping half the wall down,” Stewart says. “That’s why the cow is suddenly wandering around! The set decorator was crying in my lap as they were throwing the chickens in their cages at the barricade.” (Eventually, they found the chickens.)

The film has many other delicate triumphs, too: a rendering of Paris before it was flattened by the Haussmann Plan, a delectable grotto in which Cosette rests like a bonbon in a box, and a shipyard so dramatic it seems biblical. But Stewart’s finest accomplishment may have been the most personal. “When we made the street,” she says, “all the craftsmen were there to build it and make the texture. They all have tattoos and they’re really terrible looking. They put on the soundtrack of ‘I Dreamed a Dream,’ and I swear, all 300 men started singing at the top of their voices. I never felt such a tingle in my life.”